Doing Dutch Pronouns Automatically in Optimality Theory

Pronoun resolution algorithms often use elaborate and complicated rules and weighted factors. In this paper I will use the framework of Optimality Theory to implement an automatic pronoun resolution system for Dutch. By ranking constraints, Optimality Theory can be used to model complex behaviour and preferences, whilst keeping the constraints clear and simple. The system is developed by quantative evaluation of different configurations on a small corpus of newspaper articles, containing 222 pronouns. Even though, from a practical perspective, the performance is wanting, some linguistically interesting results are given.

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